Housewife "gigastar", and perhaps Australia's single most famous comedy export, Edna Everage claims in her autobiographyto have been born in the humble New South Wales inland township of Wagga Wagga. From there she relocated to the developing suburbia of Melbourne's Moonee Ponds and, on 12 December 1955, she made her first public stage appearance at Melbourne University's Union theatre, to promote herself as a potential "Olympic hostess" for the 1956 Olympic Games. She boasted of a home furnished with wall-to-wall burgundy carpet "and reindeers frosted on glass dining-room doors".

Edna's true origin – as is celebrity habit – diverges from accounts provided by her creator, the multitalented Australian writer-performer Barry Humphries, although Humphries has always been mindful to delineate "Mrs Norm Everage" as not a performance by himself in drag but a separate entity to whom he refers in the third person.

Humphries was barely in his 21st year and already notorious for a number of undergraduate "Dadaist" pranks around Melbourne (involving fake vomit, eating out of bins and pretending to kick blind people on trams) when, on tour as a young actor for a repertory company, he claims he began creating Edna to satirise the earnest, aspirational ladies of the regions his company were encountering on the road.

Yet Humphries' own claim has been challenged by those who identify in Edna's domestic obsessions traits strikingly similar to real-life Tasmanian self-help-and-home-hint queen, Marjorie Bligh. Bligh's numerous books advising how to make pot scourers from nail clippings, prepare "mock duck" for dinner and crochet polyester pants suits were an ubiquitous Australian bridal-gift staple at the time of Edna's development, and rumours of her influence have persisted for years. "I don't think Edna has ever admired anybody," Humphries has admitted, "as much as she admires Marjorie Bligh."

Whatever her precise inspiration, Edna's unselfconscious kitsch was as recognisable to her initial revue audiences as her double entendres and seemingly effortless satirical barbs were delightful. Subsequent appearances around Melbourne's cabarets and fledgling comedy clubs gained Edna such a following that by 1957 she was performing as herself for the very first day of broadcasting for what is now Australian television's Seven Network.

With television opportunities in the 80s, Edna – always the consummate ad-libber – developed a particular talent for televised celebrity interviews so charmingly scathing that mere participation became something of a badge of status for the cultural elite.

In 2000 she finally claimed success on Broadway with a show that was mostly improvised – she won a Tony, and added to her extraordinary CV with a inexplicable – if recurring – guest role on Ally McBealas well as a short-lived, controversial column for Vanity Fair.

In 2011 she commentated on the royal wedding for Channel 7, and, as this is written, she is still filming TV specials, has recently appeared in a Sydney Opera House production of Peter and the Wolf and is concluding her "first farewell tour" in a show called Eat, Pray, Laugh(note Humphries is now 80 years old).

In all the discussion of Tony Abbott's reintroduction of British-style "knights and dames" honours to Australia, it is worth remembering that our great social reformist prime minister Gough Whitlam used the privilege of his office to confer but one "imperial honour" during his all-too-short term in office. That he bestowed it in person upon Edna Everage – in the arrivals lounge at Sydney airport in the final scene of Barry Mackenzie Holds His Own – demands all contemporary Australians consider a serious question: in light of all this singular woman has achieved in her life, how could any other Australian possibly be fit for the honour?